


a lack of sunlight

by shirohyasha



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-BBL, bottle fic i guess, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 08:52:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15637359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirohyasha/pseuds/shirohyasha
Summary: Ryouta is left alone with two ghosts and a promise that Sakuya will come back. He's not entirely convinced it's enough to stop him from going mad.





	a lack of sunlight

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [нехватка солнечного света](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18157529) by [Vivaldiny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vivaldiny/pseuds/Vivaldiny)



> man how do you even go about reacting to hatoful it's been like a year and i'm still in shock

Ryouta is left with a pair of ghosts and a promise from a boy who had only been kind to him at the very end. It’s just about enough to stop him from going mad.

He’d rescued Hiyoko’s brain from the wreck of metal they’d left it in, tried his best to preserve it using the equipment still down here. Hiyoko’s spirit hangs on to it, occasionally fading into existence long enough to chatter away at him cheerily.

Nageki is not so cheerful, but he is more stable than Hiyoko. Perhaps it is because he is used to existing as a ghost, perhaps it is because birds are more evolved than humans and so when their brains are damaged, there is more personality left.

Nageki thinks it is something else. “Miss Tosaka’s brain is still alive,” he says. “I don’t think she could be revived as is, but her brain isn’t quite dead yet.”

 

Ryouta is the herald of the apocalypse, the harbinger of the end for humanity. He doesn’t want to burn to death but he doesn’t have to, because Sakuya promised to find him a solution and he has no doubt that Sakuya will run the rest of the world to ruin just to keep a promise.

If Nageki hadn’t been so sick, if he had been able to make friends, maybe he wouldn’t have had to burn either. But his only friend had been a kind if unimportant teacher, and no matter how long he thinks on it, Ryouta cannot think of a way Nageki could have been saved.

 

Hiyoko fades in and out of existence, out more than in, always demanding Ryouta and Nageki play games with her or that they sit in a circle and tell scary stories. Hiyoko seems determined to treat this like a camping trip, like they’ve borrowed a tent from their parents and gone hiking deep into a forest, and that so long as they all pretend hard enough, it’s just fun.

Their surroundings are bleak and dark and boring, but if Ryouta fiddles with the lights he can make the shadows on the wall huge and dark and deep, and if not for the silence they could be in a forest at night. Hiyoko’s games are more fun than the alternative.

Nageki slowly tells them about his siblings. His little brothers and sisters, his big brother, some of the adults. The games they used to play, even though Nageki was sick and couldn’t really join in, how they’d take it in turns sitting out and playing shogi or reading with him. How he couldn’t play hide and seek or go flying with them but Hitori always asked for his help cooking dinner, and how nice it was to feel needed, even just a little.

“You’re kind of scrawny, Nageki,” Hiyoko tells him cheerfully and insensitively. “You should eat more red meat! That’ll put some weight on you!”

 

Hiyoko happily recounts stories of hunting for food every day, bargaining with the few remaining humans for salt and flour and ice cream. She tells the two of them about her cave, with its clean soft animal pelts and the huge open fireplace, smack in the middle of the cave floor so that even in winter she was always warm.

Ryouta remembers her cave vaguely. He can’t remember ever going in but it had seemed huge from the outside, set into a cliff face and far enough from civilisation that it must have been hard living.

Hiyoko’s almost deranged cheer only makes it seem worse. “Two hours to the nearest water source!” she says happily. “I could run the whole way there and back, and I got to carry the water back too! Ah, I miss being outdoors.”

She does. She tells them about the forest and the traps she set, stalking her prey sometimes for days. Humans were pursuit predators, ten thousand years ago. They had to revert to that on the brink of extinction.

Ryouta doesn’t have much to add. All of his best memories are of Hiyoko.

His father had died when he was too young to really know him, and now, years after his death, he finds out that the man he had always been desperate to know was a maniac, a right wing extremist and a scientist that someone as cruel as Iwamine could look up to. His mother was dying, maybe already dead. His last words to her will have been trite and meaningless, a thanks-for-lunch or see-you-later. Ryouta would dearly like to see her even one last time.

 

Nageki’s life had been tragedy after tragedy, but even in between that he had managed to find some scraps of joy. Ryouta’s life has been largely void of either, and he almost regrets it.

“Oh Ryouta! Do you remember that time we went to the arcade together…” Hiyoko prattles on, seeming to recall every moment she’s ever spent with anyone. Hiyoko is a genius in one sense and the greatest kind of fool in another, forgetting anything she deems irrelevant and caring little for decorum or manners. It is probably the only thing Ryouta will have to be grateful for, for a long time, that she counts him as relevant.

She had been on the student council, but had spent time with almost everyone in the school. She had made friends with a ghost in the library and bothered Yuuya during infirmary hours when Ryouta was trapped there. She had raced Okosan more than once during track club practice and had managed to coerce Nanaki – Hitori? – into helping her with maths lessons. She had been doing everything at once, so it had seemed.

 

She had come to visit him after school a little less than in first year, though. Ryouta hates himself for being sad about that, because some of the others clearly needed Hiyoko more than he did.

“Sakuya doesn’t even know how to use a mop, Ryouta, it was like he just expected me to clean everything for him!” Hiyoko exclaims. “And to think, the first time I made him apologise he looked like he was going to have a fit!”

That. That certainly sounds like Sakuya. Ryouta is a little cheered by her words, her tall tales of Sakuya’s incompetence. It’s fun to hear about. Ryouta thinks the three of them could have been good friends, if Sakuya could be given a little time.

Sakuya had been – not kind to him, even at the end, brusque and rude and insulting, but something approaching it. Ryouta doesn’t think Sakuya knows how to be kind, which is depressing because it means no one has ever been kind to him. Except Yuuya, but Yuuya is eccentric and whimsical and Sakuya’s least favourite person.

Was. Was Sakuya’s least favourite person. Yuuya is dead now, and Nageki always has been, and Hiyoko is as good as. Hitori-Kazuaki might be by now, and so might Iwamine, and so might the entire human race. Trapped down here, they have no way to know.

 

There is no way of knowing how much time is passing. Sakuya had promised to come back for him, and Ryouta isn’t going to resent him if he doesn’t keep that promise, but he does think he might die before Sakuya _can_ come back for him. Ryouta thinks it might take years to come up with a cure.

Nageki, surprisingly, is more optimistic than he is. “If they have Isa – no, if they have Iwamine working with them, I’m sure it won’t take more than a few months,” he says. “And Iwamine is sensible. I’m sure he’ll work with the Doves.”

Ryouta doesn’t point out that Nageki’s brother might well have killed Iwamine, because he really wants to get out of here.

“Hey, Nageki,” he asks one day. “What happens to you next?”

Nageki stares that the ceiling. “I don’t know. I didn’t even realise I was dead until I started to talk to the living. I think I could move on, if I wanted.”

Nageki doesn’t move on though, and Ryouta feels selfish but he is very grateful. He doesn’t want to be lonely, he doesn’t want to be alone, and Hiyoko is only barely there, more ghostly than Nageki.

 

Abandoned underground laboratories are naturally creepy places, but at least the resident ghosts are on his side. He explores the rubble and the ruins, the burnt remnants of the room Nageki must have died in, the parts of the laboratory that weren’t destroyed in the fire.

There are storage banks for food, but not enough to last much longer. There is a lot of equipment, presumably years out of date but still intimidating and blindingly shiny. There are reams upon reams of paper files that survived, and presumably thousands more that didn’t. There is nothing surprising down here, but that might just be because they already found the surprises and all that’s left is time.

Hiyoko floats into existence and chatters and then floats out. Nageki visits the library and brings him back books, somehow. Ryouta was never a big reader but there’s not a lot else for him to do, so he reads the books Nageki brings him and waits.

 

He rations his food carefully. He’s always been sensible with food, always known that mother doesn’t have a lot of money and that he has to make sure what they have will last. But this is another level again. It’s good there’s not a lot he has to do down here, because if there was he’d surely starve.

“You’re getting thin, Ryouta,” Hiyoko exclaims one day. “You should eat more! Do some exercise!”

He tries to explain that he can’t really, not if he wants his food to last. Nageki can sometimes bring him food, the way he brings books, but most of the time it’s too hard for him to interact with the material world and not many people bring lunch to the school anymore anyway. Ryouta isn’t sure, but he’s pretty sure it’s been declared a terrorist zone and cordoned off. He can’t eat more because he doesn’t have the food to eat.

Hiyoko, of course, doesn’t care. “Sakuya will come back way before your food runs out!” she says cheerfully. “And then you’ll feel silly having all this food leftover and still being weak and hungry.”

Ryouta is weak and hungry, but he’d been weak and hungry a lot even before he was trapped down here, so he can cope with that just fine.

 

Some more time passes. Ryouta explores the laboratories as much as he can, until he knows his way around all the parts he can access. He finds three extra food sources, three single sacks of dried seeds, and two more paperbacks that must have belonged to scientists that worked here.

“I can’t imagine Iwamine reading a light novel,” Hiyoko says. “I think it’d be pretty funny to watch though.”

Hiyoko can still find things about Iwamine funny, even though he made Yuuya cut her into pieces and planted a deadly virus into Ryouta and drove Nageki to suicide. Ryouta doesn’t know if he loves or hates her for that.

 

He was never close to Yuuya, but he knew him by reputation. Everyone knew him by reputation. It was a pretty incredible reputation. He’s not sure what’s true, but he’s starting to think that all of it was. Yuuya was half-nobility, a superspy, and had cut Hiyoko up and put the pieces into boxes for the students to find. Knowing all that, it was pretty silly to dismiss any of the other rumours about him as being silly.

“Yuuya’s dreamy,” Hiyoko sighs. “Sure, he’s crazy and has a death wish, but he’s so cool.”

Ryouta might be jealous. He’s glad he didn’t have to work for Iwamine though. He doesn’t much want to be a spy if that’s the sort of thing it involves.

It had also got Yuuya killed. A lot of people had nearly died, but Yuuya really had. He’d died to protect his stubborn baby brother, and he’d died because of a wish Ryouta had made.

It wasn’t really Ryouta’s fault that Iwamine had done what he did. Most birds wouldn’t hear a child wish for peace and decide genocide was the best way to grant that. But he still feels guilty, how can he not feel guilty? Iwamine had only done what he did because of Ryouta.

 

Ryouta has no way of knowing how long has passed – there are no clocks and no windows, only the shadowy lights of the backup generator and his own beating heart. It could have been weeks or months he’s been down here. It feels like millennia. It feels like he has never been anywhere else.

Nageki tells him it is winter now, which means it has only been a few months. That’s good, he supposes. He struggles to recall Sakuya’s face sometimes, to remember Okosan’s or Yuuya’s. He remembers his mother. He remembers Hiyoko, even when confronted with her distorted ghostly form time after time.

He wishes he could have pictures to remember everyone by. He wishes he could have a phone or a window or something, anything to remember the outside world by. He misses everyone terribly.

 

Sakuya will come for him eventually. It’s just a question of what he will find when he does.

**Author's Note:**

> poor kids


End file.
